Sunday, December 19, 2004

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Who's Afraid of China?

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Who's Afraid of China?: "No other major computer maker produces computers in the United States. Long ago, Dell's top rival, Hewlett-Packard, outsourced assembly of its PC's to third parties, primarily based in Asia, as did I.B.M., the world's third-largest PC maker. And I.B.M., which created the PC market in 1981, is leaving the business, announcing this month that it is selling its PC unit to Lenovo, the Chinese computer giant. 'It's been a long time since one of our competitors actually made a computer,' said Michael S. Dell, the founder and chairman of the company that bears his name.
Dell, by contrast, operates three giant assembly plants in the United States - two in Austin and the third outside Nashville. Each is large enough to house six contiguous football fields. Last month, the company announced that it would build a fourth plant, twice as big as the others, near Winston-Salem, N.C. And, inside the company, executives talk about opening a fifth one, probably in Nevada, where it would build computers according to each customer's specifications. At a White House conference on the economy on Wednesday, Kevin D. Rollins, Dell's chief executive, boasted, not quite accurately, that all the computers the company sells domestically are made right here in the United States. 'None is outsourced; none is made in other countries and shipped in,' he said, though Dell laptops are in fact assembled overseas."